The Wes Moore Restoration (for now)

It was revealing two days after the Martin Luther King national holiday to hear an inauguration ceremony in Annapolis filled with militarism, which King denounced as an evil worthy of being mentioned in the same grouping as racism and poverty. King doesn't hedge his point out of fear of being thought of as insufficiently respectful of the ordinary soldiers and sailors of the U.S. military. Militarism as a value is an evil that America must allow to "die," he writes, so that a new set of values can be born. "Our government must depend more on its moral power than its military power."

Every year on that holiday liberals and leftists (those who are not too weary to participate altogether) like to roast conservatives for their efforts to honor MLK in as content-free a way as possible. Some on the right wing single out the one sentence from the Dream speech about being judged on the content of one's character, as an argument for colorblindness. Others appear to not acknowledge any particular viewpoint at all. Maryland's outgoing governor Larry Hogan, in two separate tweets, acknowledged King with terms like wisdom, courage, principles, without articulating what those principles might have been, or why they might have required courage. This is all fun to a degree, but the left wing is guilty of their own version of this, when we say for example, as I said above, King opposed militarism. More common among socialists is the reminder that he was reputed to have said he supported democratic socialism (though wasn't willing to say this in public). Yes, but so what? The day of celebration of King's secular sainthood is not about these lesser-known principles, and it's unclear that whether they were better known, that this would strengthen their persuasiveness with the American public. We ought to be arguing for what we believe itself, not that others should think it is good because we can deploy a King quotation on its behalf. The first twitter reply under Hogan's goofy pic of himself standing below a King statue, is a clap: "You stand against everything he fought for!" But it's not really true to say that King fought for socialism. He was busy enough fighting to end a regime of white supremacist terrorism. What if Hogan got the better of this particular exchange, paying his empty-headed tribute?

At least that's how it seemed to me as the Maryland democratic establishment celebrated its triumphal restoration to the Annapolis governor's mansion, after two failures in a row, to install, respectively, O'Malley's lackluster dauphin, Anthony Brown, and then pointedly failing to support its own unwanted and accidental nominee, Ben Jealous, letting the capital be run by the legislature, but waiting out the eight long years to retake the reins of the crumbling bureaucracy. In 2022 the party had a primary cycle largely devoid of major policy disagreements, because they had such a successful grip on the race this time around that no one who might be critical of them even tried. Instead it became a race of personal styles and regional and professional affiliations, and the winner, narrowly, was an Oprah-inflected Influencer and Nonprofit Industrial Complex "guru" of sorts endorsed by both the state senate president and the speaker of the state house. Like Hogan before him, Moore had never held elected office of any kind, but even Hogan had a thorough knowledge of state government through his cabinet term in the Ehrlich administration (03-07) and his lucrative career in state influence peddling, from which perch he could claim to be an "outsider" who could help you navigate the state's bureaucracy, for the right price. Moore, by contrast, was a complete neophyte, at risk of being putty in the hands of Jones and Ferguson, which sounded great to both of them.

But Moore does have a distinguished record of public service, his supporters might say. He served in the U.S. Army, in a war zone, after all. His campaign was highly military-inflected, in its "leave no one behind" slogan (behind from where? are we in a war zone too? where is there for us to go back to?) which is now on the "Welcome to Maryland" highway signs, to many ads of testimonials from his fellow soldiers. "He could have done anything, but he chose to serve," one said. Why might he have chosen this? Well, it seems to have been a great resume builder, for one. “From Afghanistan to Annapolis, Wes Moore has always put serving others before himself to set the example,” a fellow soldier said while introducing Moore. 20 years of horror in the war in Afghanistan has not prevented us as a country from being ashamed of saying things like this in public. Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, billions of dollars wasted, an environmental and cultural catastrophe, the Taliban restored to power, and the longest war in the history of the United States military, but at least it was good for Wes Moore, the year after Biden mercifully brought the whole mess to a close (for now). We could also peek into Moore's wretched memoir, or his dubious anti poverty and educational executive career, but I think it is fair to say that looking back at Moore's career to date, from his army days until last Tuesday, its greatest success has been his own publicity.

Moore stepped to the podium to give his inaugural speech, in which he attempted to dust off the Obama 2004 DNC speech about how there is not a red America and a blue America, with some revisions to account for the most salient issues of the day, but keeping the same theme: We don't have serious disagreements here. There isn't a conflict that I must take a side on. Please think of me as a potential future President. I'd look really good in the official White House portrait. I'm not going to upset anybody too much while I have the job. Just file that thought away.

Moore: "We can build a police force that moves with appropriate intensity and absolute integrity and full accountability, and embrace the fact that we can’t militarize ourselves to safety. We can support our first responders who risk everything to protect us, and change the inexcusable fact that Maryland incarcerates more Black boys than any other state." What if the police force wants to militarize itself? What if it considers itself unaccountable to democratic oversight? What should we do about such a state of affairs? Should Maryland incarcerate fewer Black boys so that it has a less upsetting place in the rankings by state? What is the correct number of Black boys who should be incarcerated, that we should feel good about?

Moore's testimonial of his own military service was pretty vague, but he's confident that he became a better person through the experience, of whatever he happened to be doing in central Asia: "My years of service transformed me. My character was strengthened, my vistas were widened, my leadership was tested." To his litany of false choices in the speech ("We do not have to choose between a safe state and a just state."), he might have added: I, Wes Moore, do not need to choose between serving others, and making out like a bandit, and living in a mansion.

Meanwhile, Moore's defeated general election opponent, Dan Cox, seemed to convey a separate meaning in the 2022 primary election cycle: the apparent self-destructiveness of Republican primary voters in Maryland. Hogan's preferred successor, Kelly Schulz, could not benefit from his popularity, and thus the choice of Cox was interpreted as a snub to Hogan from his own party, or as an expression of the party's loyalty to Trump over Hogan, a dire sign for Hogan's potential presidential aspirations, at least within the Republican party, in 2024 or beyond. Some attempted to blame the Democrats for Cox's success, for running an ad before the primary that highlighted Cox's extremism (and some Democrats even gladly took the credit for their supposed reverse-psychology coup). But Cox's primary success mirrored that of the Republicans' state attorney general nominee, neoconfederate Michael Peroutka, who received no such Democratic "support."

Moore handily defeated Cox, and Brown handily defeated Peroutka, both by similar margins to Trump's performance in Maryland against Clinton and Biden. But it is worth interpreting the two nominations a bit less jovially. Peroutka, like Cox, not only signifies a general support for Trump, but a support for insurrection to install Trump, no matter how the votes turned out; that the Democratic-supporting constituencies in the state (and country) are illegitimate. I don't doubt that if either man had the muscle to do it, they would have marched on Annapolis on Wednesday and taken over. It's alarming that a majority of their fellow party members in this state feel that way, and wanted to send a message in voting for the two of them, dim 2022 general election prospects be damned. Who knows how many more of these things we're going to have, anyway. If Trump or someone Trump-like takes control in Washington, we may end up with Governor Cox someday after all.